Reading Matters, Vol. 11, Issue 1, August 31, 2005

From (under) the Chair's Desk

Now that I’ve taken my screwdriver to the chair’s desk to make it fit, maybe I should share some of the issues piling up on top of it, or the things I see while sitting at the chair’s desk, or perhaps the issues that I hide underneath the desk, or the pronouncements I might make while crouched under the desk, or…

First and foremost, let me share my greatest discovery of a month at the chair’s desk: we have a superb office staff! My boundless thanks to Gayle, Cherie, Sharry, Elizabeth, Vicky, Linda, and Carolyn, without whom the department would rapidly grind to a halt. We are lucky to have such a wonderful team dedicated to making English happen at Iowa and everything that works smoothly is due to their efforts. Thanks, all, for doing a great job!

Next, let me share some interesting strategic news from Monday’s DEO meeting with the Dean. The leitmotif of this meeting was the Dean passing on the latest shibboleth from the Provost: that Iowa should be looking at a smaller, better-compensated faculty. First the good news: this seems to imply serious attention to faculty salaries over the next few years. The declared goal is to get average salaries from the bottom third of CIC institutions, where Iowa currently sits, to the top third. The Dean and Provost are talking about the possibility of increases above inflation for the next three years and are even talking about the likelihood of mid-year salary raises this January (with the caution that not all departments will see mid-year raises and not all faculty will see them). The amount of money available for travel has been mildly increased and there may be more money for other forms of faculty support coming. Then the bad news: the prospect for getting new lines looks very grim. The Dean has authorized just twelve searches throughout the whole college this year (in contrast with about 50 last year) and the prospect for new faculty hiring in the next few years may be slight. And apparently the Provost is also talking about fewer TAs and smaller, more focused graduate programs.

So far as English is concerned, I think we can make a case that our graduate programs are now at an appropriately focused size. In terms of faculty numbers, I’m relieved that we were so spectacularly successful in last year’s searches. Now we just have to persuade all existing faculty not to retire or resign until the climate changes. In my more cynical moments, I can’t help suspecting that could always happen fairly soon. Indeed, I could have sworn I heard this very same Provost six months ago saying that he had two key priorities – increasing faculty salaries and increasing faculty numbers – but that, I realize, was a different era.

Finally for this week, let me share a few of the concerns and issues that I see coming up or that I’m currently trying to tackle but haven’t yet got on top of:

And if you see a shadowy figure flitting out from underneath the chair's desk, do feel free to stop me and let me know what you are thinking.

Departmental Matters

COURSE RENUMBERING

… is becoming a reality that we need to tackle this semester. The new system will involve prefixes made up of letters rather than numbers and course levels stretching from 1000 to 9999. The details of the new system are presented well in a recent memo. In English, we will want to make sure that the numbers appropriately signal the level of courses and that the numbers are used consistently in the various parts of our operation, including GenEd Literature, Nonfiction Writing, and the Writers’ Workshop. I have called an expanded curriculum committee meeting to discuss this on Thursday, but there is one fundamental element of the new system on which people may want to express a preference. Should all English Department courses carry the prefix ENG or ENGL? Either would be allowed in the new system, and Engineering is not going for anything close (instead going for, e.g. BME for Biomechanical Engineering). If you have strong feelings in favor of either ENG or ENGL, please e-mail me (jonathan-wilcox@uiowa.edu).

STRATEGIC PLAN

It’s that time of the decade, again, when the University and the Colleges get to create a new strategic plan. This time round there has been no talk (yet) of the department needing to create its own strategic plan to add to the propagation of bureaucratic documents. Instead, we are invited to respond and make suggestions to the College’s draft strategic plan, a draft of which is available here. The Dean is quite genuine, I think, in wanting as much feedback from departments as possible and the plan does, of course, have real importance as a framework for future decision making, even as it seems that most interesting initiatives are so subject to changing fiscal realities that spelling them out in a five-year plan is more quixotic than practical.

Trying to navigate a reasonable path between that sense of the importance and the futility of this exercise, I am distributing the plan here and I invite anyone to contact me with suggestions, issues, or reactions to it. I would like to give the department as a whole the opportunity to discuss the plan as a group, but only to the extent that that seems useful. My plan, then, is to make this an agenda item at an upcoming departmental meeting, but not the only item, so that we can hold a group discussion of the strategic issues if faculty would like, but move on quite quickly if we choose to limit our contributions to this particular document. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have suggestions or reactions to this (jonathan-wilcox@uiowa.edu).

Publications, Presentations, and other Faculty Matters

Paul Diehl, Director Emeritus of the Nonfiction Writing Program, has won the Cape Cod Literary Trust Award for the best memoir/essay of 2005, "Rain," to be published this coming spring along with a selection of his poems in an anthology of award-winning verse and prose. Another of Paul's experiments in analogous form, "Rain" is a "discontinuous essay," comparable to the discontinuous functions of calculus as well as of human memory, where a small change in the input results in a broken jump or gap in the output that is integral to the function as a whole.

Claire Fox was one of six faculty members to receive a Major Projects Grant from University of Iowa International Programs. With her $10,000 grant, Professor Fox will organize "Liberalism and Its Legacies," a symposium on Latin American History in honor of Charles A. Hale. The keynote address and four panels will present contemporary scholarship on fields to which Hale has made distinguished contributions. These fields include the history of U.S.-Latin American relations, the Mexican revolution and its aftermath, and the relation of 19th century liberalism to contemporary neo-liberalism. Hale is a UI professor emeritus of Latin American history and long-time supporter of Latin American Studies at the UI. The symposium will take place in March 2006.

David Hamilton helped celebrate The Iowa Review's 35th year with the journal's annual Live from Prairie Lights reading on August 30. Former English graduate student Jim McKean read his essay “D/Altered.”

Kevin Kopelson has been awarded his second residency at the Rockefeller Foundation's Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, for Oct.-Nov. 2005.

This summer, Marie Krueger led a workshop on Africa for the Iowa International Programs' Summer Institute for Teachers. The enormously popular workshop, "Global Encounters: Teaching African Cultures through Literature and Film," was offered to middle and high school teachers in eastern Iowa.

Tom Lutz sends the following:

My new book, Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums is in copy editing and will be published this spring by FSG. I was invited to have a piece in the next issue of Steve Erickson’s Black Clock, an issue devoted to guilty pleasures with pieces by Jonathan Lethem, Don DeLillo, Rick Moody & others; my piece is on my love of Martin Lawrence movies and has a cameo appearance by our own Dave Wittenberg, cleverly disguised as “Dave.” The issue will be out this fall. My satire on the Intelligent Design controversy is appearing in the Op-Ed section of the LA Times this week; it is a comic plea for cosmopolitan openness and includes my own contribution to the discussion, the theory of Malevolent Design. . Just in case this offends the Deity, my review of Holy Tears (Princeton 2005) will be in an upcoming issue of Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture. My article on “Spending Time” is just out in Consumption in the Age of Information, edited by Sande Cohen and R.L. Rutsky, a volume with essays by Jean Baudrillard, Samuel Weber, Sylvère Lotringer, Mark Poster, and others. And I will be giving talks at UCLA in September and Stanford University in October.

I have started a one-year stint as Interim Director of the MFA Writing Program and Visiting Professor of Critical Studies at the California Institute for the Arts. It is extremely interesting so far and perfectly honeymoonish. CalArts is a very different kind of institution and I am enjoying and learning from the contrast.

Teresa Mangum was one of fifteen faculty members chosen to attend the Center for Teaching's "Service-Learning Institute" in May. The workshop was led by a national expert (and professor of literature at Bentley College), Edward Zlotkowski. The participants from across campus are each transforming a conventional course into a service-learning course in partnership with a local nonprofit or service organization. Students will contract for a certain number of hours of service throughout the semester. The service serves as one of the course "texts" and is woven into the work of the class through writing assignments that encourage students to make connections between literary texts and experiential learning, class discussion, and research projects. Mangum's course description https://isis4.uiowa.edu/isis/courses/detail/008:179:SCA suggests how she will incorporate service-learning in a new course, "Literature and Society: Capturing Animals."

The Institute, supported by the Provost's Office and by the UI Undergraduate Student Government, was designed to encourage faculty members to take advantage of the University's new membership in the national "Campus Compact," an organization which provides resources, advice, and grant support for service-learning. The Center for Teaching hopes to host a second Institute for Service-Learning next summer. Faculty members whose applications are accepted receive a week of training, $4,000, assistance in finding an appropriate community partner, and follow-up consultation as they develop their courses. For more information, please see the Center for Teaching website http://www.uiowa.edu/~centeach (which has links to Campus Compact http://www.compact.org/ and to their own resources for service-learning http://www.uiowa.edu/~centeach/service ) or contact Jean Florman of the Center.

Garrett Stewart and Teresa Mangum and graduate students Kate Henderson and Sucheta Mallick took part in the 2005 Dickens Universe on the campus of UC Santa Cruz this August. The department regularly sends a faculty member and two graduate students to this annual week-long conference that focuses on a single work by Charles Dickens – Little Dorrit, this year. Teresa Mangum was summer-long mentor to the international panel of senior graduate students as they prepared the papers they would deliver as part of the annual graduate panel. (She was also a thespian – with a miniscule but deeply demanding role – she reports – in "Little Dorrit's Honeymoon," a farce written especially for the Universe.) Garrett Stewart held the honorary (and challenging position) of "swing lecturer" – in which a much-esteemed faculty member must steers the rough seas between the Dickens "fans," who are about to depart, and the weekend conference scholars, who are just arriving. His talk "Barred Narrative" included an experimental retelling of Little Dorrit from the point of view of the mother of one of the characters and others. For more information about the Dickens Universe, see http://humwww.ucsc.edu/dickens/universe/universe.html.

Over the summer, Doug Trevor was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor. On Sept. 24, Doug will present "Shakespeare on Passion, Deceit, and Sadness" as part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Saturday Scholars Series. (See below for details.) You can also catch him on "Talk of Iowa," WSUI AM-910 & WOI-AM 640, KTPR-FM 91.1, and KOWI-FM 90.7 on Sept. 22 (10:00 a.m.) in anticipation of his Saturday Scholars day talk.

Graduate Matters

Yiyun Li is a finalist for The Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and has been invited to the awards ceremony in Ireland in late September. More details about the prize and jury can be found on www.munsterlit.ie.

Upcoming Events

Sept. 2 (Fri.) – Career Development Award reports are due from spring 2005 recipients.

Sept. 2 (Fri.), 3:30 p.m., Gerber Lounge – Ken Clinkenbeard from ITS will explain the "Turn It In" plagiarism detection service to which the university subscribes. If time permits, the event will also offer an opportunity to discuss combating plagiarism and cheating more broadly.

Sept. 6 (Tue.) – Deadline for corrections to Spring 2006 schedule for courses to be given to Sharry Lenhart. See e-mail from Sharry of 8/30/05.

Sept. 8 (Thr.) – Deadline for travel plans. See magenta forms in faculty mailboxes.

Sept. 9 (Fri.) – Deadline for submitting Career Development Award applications to Jon Wilcox.

Sept. 12 (Mon.) – Monday Lunchtime Discussion (see sign-up sheet in Gerber Lounge)

Sept. 16 (Fri.) – Deadline for submitting Faculty and Global Scholar Award applications to Jon Wilcox.

Sept. 17 (Sat.), 5:30-7:30 p.m. – The Fall Departmental Party will be held at the home of Jon Wilcox and Denise Filios, 404 Linder Rd NE, Iowa City.

Sept. 22 (Thr.), 10:00 a.m. – Doug Trevor will be a guest on "Talk of Iowa," WSUI AM-910 & WOI-AM 640, KTPR-FM 91.1, and KOWI-FM 90.7 in anticipation of his participation in the Saturday Scholars Series (see below).

Sept. 22 (Thr.), 8:00 p.m., Drake Univ., Cowles Library Reading Room – Dale Bauer, Professor of English at Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, will speak on "Sex Expression and American Women Writers," at Drake University in Des Moines. Dina Smith of Drake's English Dept. has expressly invited members of the U of I English Dept. to attend both the talk and a reception afterwards.

Sept. 24 (Sat.), 10:00-11:00 a.m., Schaeffer Hall, Room 40 – Doug Trevor will present "Shakespeare on Passion, Deceit, and Sadness" as part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Saturday Scholars Series. Each session will include a 20-30 minute presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. Refreshments will be served.

Oct. 18 (Tue.), 12:00 noon, 331 EPB – a brown bag lunch with Gerry Heng

Oct. 18 (Tue.), 4:00-6:00 p.m., IMU, South Room – Gerry Heng talk/reception

October 21 (Fri.) – Deadline for submitting Flex Load Assignment applications to Jon Wilcox.

Nov. 3 (Thr.), Gerber Lounge –This year's Freedman Lecture will be given by Romanticist James Chandler, Univ. of Chicago. Topic and exact time to be announced.

Nov. 4 (Fri.), Gerber Lounge – This year's Freedman Seminar will be led by Romanticist James Chandler, Univ. of Chicago. Topic and exact time to be announced.

Nov. 5-Feb. 6, 2006 – “Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass” exhibit at the U of I Museum of Art (in conjunction with the “Whitman Making Books / Books Making Whitman” Symposium, see below).

Nov. 8 (Tue.), Gerber Lounge – Lecture by Alan Trachtenberg, Yale Univ., on Whitman and Melville

Nov. 10-12 (Thr.-Sat.), IMU – NONFICTIONOW Conference. Keynotes and readings will be delivered by Philip Lopate, Pico Iyer, and Lauren Slater. Other panelists and readers include NPR reporter Jacki Lyden, Anthony Shadid, Jack Hitt, Faith Adele, Hope Edelman, Bob Shacochis, James Alan McPherson, Albert Goldbarth, David Shields, and many others.

Nov. 10-12 (Thr.-Sat.) – The “Whitman Making Books / Books Making Whitman” symposium will celebrate Whitman as a bookmaker. The keynote speaker will be Ezra Greenspan of Southern Methodist Univ., and other speakers will include Betsy Erkkila, Ted Genoways, Charles Green, Jerome Loving, and Kenneth M. Price. The symposium is directed by Ed Folsom and David Schoonover.

Nov. 10-13 (Thr.-Sun.), The Pfister Hotel, Milwaukee, WI – The 47th Annual M/MLA Convention. The theme of this year's convention is "History, Memory, Exile."

Nov. 18 (Fri.) - Deadline for curriculum development grant applications.

Dec. 9 (Fri.) – Deadline for submitting Old Gold Summer Fellowship applications to Jon Wilcox.

Future Issues

Please send any items for Reading Matters or the departmental calendar to Carolyn Jacobson at carolyn-jacobson@uiowa.edu. Reading Matters will appear every other Wednesday, and submissions should be received by 5 p.m. on the preceding Tuesday. Please send submissions for the next issue by 5 p.m. on Sept. 13. Thanks very much.